Zulawski’s final film–a begrudgingly apt swan song–follows a freshly-failed law student’s descent into a bed and breakfast’s vortex of pulsating ids. Based on Witold Gombrowicz’s surreal novel of the same name, the story leaps from free-associative monologues (sometimes in the voice of Donald Duck) declaring Sartre a “mistaken crosseye” to an indulgent obsession with a dead sparrow in the woods, as our Byronic protagonist broods around the property, falls in love, and lusts to touch a hairlip. Dense and deliberate, eerie tableau vivants see Zulawski’s characters writhing on the floor in intense episodes of pain/ecstasy, building a mystery–but one that the audience nonetheless may not, and need not, fully parse.